> He should start buying some cheap tools of his own (to start with) and do weekend/night jobs for himself. If he's working on 1.5m homes I guarantee you there are a ton of homeowners who need electrical jobs done. Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

> There are a ton of niches and other opportunities. For example being available during late hours. In anything like a large or medium city you can charge $150-350 per hour and people will happily pay it.

> Doing this while working for someone else is a good way to survive the initial ups and downs. If he builds a reputation for doing good work his clients will start begging him to quit his day job.

Did you think about possibility that his current employer will crush him like an egg for competing with him on weekends?

How would they even know? Assuming they keep quiet about it

Yeah, once the employer finds out, they've got enough business to quit.

Licensing is different for trade employers vs trade people.

it depends....

sometimes licenses are different between working for yourself vs someone else. Other times your employer can't take on jobs without you and your license present.

Then there's insurance differences between self-employed and employed ______ tradesperson.

Depending on the size of the town / city, it could be trivial. There's ~6 companies doing electrical work in my town. Not only are they commented on / recommended on local social media, they see each other's quotes all the time when people compare prices. If someone started a new business, I suspect they'd all know within days/weeks.

From other specialist non-trade business I'm familiar with, people are normally aware of new employees coming to town before they even start working. People talk to each other.

This part:

> Get on Yelp, ask his customers to leave good reviews, and build a business.

You can’t do a good business without leaving visible traces - permits, customers, suppliers, etc. all provide ways for information to leak. If his employer is exploitative, he has above average odds of correctly fearing retribution and depending on the area that could mean unemployment. It’s not exactly uncommon for companies to discretely agree not to hire certain people.

> depending on the area that could mean unemployment

This is the key reason why for most jobs, small town America is flyover country, an economically inefficient, exploitative, broken system. Without a large labor & employment market within easy commuting distance, your skills aren't portable if you get fired, and your boss can't readily find a replacement, so most employment relationships end up in a reluctant, often abusive state from one or the other.

Contracting electrical requires different licensing than most trades people have to do their job.

Employment works very differently in trades than e.g. software. The main thing is that customers don't care about the company they're using, but about the guy that comes out to help them. So picking up a clientele is extremely easy if you do a good job. And word of mouth multiplies that clientele pretty quickly. And the thing about the trades is that they always need to be done, endlessly. Paint starts to chip, electricity eventually breaks, plumbers go without saying, ...

This is why the normal trajectory, for a skilled tradesman, is apprenticeship -> experience -> accumulate clients -> go independent.

If you want to go independent in something like software you need, among other things, a good idea. If you want to go independent in the trades, all you need is a good reputation and enough people with your card. You don't even need to try either really. Do a good job and people themselves will proactively ask for your contact information. Finding a good and reliable tradesman is not easy.

If there's one thing that I've learned hanging out on /r/freelance, it's that most people are not cut out to be business owners.

Seems like a startup niche - a more idealized Uber for electricians - abstract the worst parts, help tradespeople keep more of the money their work produces.

That is basically franchising, you exchange some cash upfront and ongoing royalties for a brand name and some level of support with training/business planning/marketing/leadgen/software etc. There’s a franchise for just about anything you can think of, and a surprising number local businesses in the US these days are actually franchises, not just fast food restaurants. Some are excellent and some are scams!

Can you elaborate why?

The self-employed plumber has to accept phone calls when they're in the middle of a job, has to do a whole day's work then spend their evenings lining up future work, has to manage their schedule a long way in advance, has to keep commitments even in the face of illness and family emergencies, has to go around giving quotes to people many of whom are just comparing prices, has to manage cashflow and deliveries, has to make nice even with homeowners who are a pain in the ass, has to be able to sell potential customers on the quality of work they haven't yet done, has to deal with complaints, has to chase payment and deal with nonpaying customers, has to keep accounts and business records properly, and so on.

A jobbing plumber just needs to text his buddies asking if they've got any work for him this week, do the job and leave with cash in hand the same day.

If you're good at plumbing but disorganised or don't have great self-discipline, the latter is a much simpler way of working.

Very well said!

A very significant number of freelancers think of themselves as employees. They struggle with "asking for raises," instead of telling their clients "this is my new rate." They are extremely depressed when a contract isn't renewed, or is terminated early "they fired me. Why?" They are dependent on a single client, let themselves form close relationships with that client's employees, have their working hours set for them, etc.

Going into freelancing, the first thing you should be thinking is "I am a business that employs one person: me."

If he's union he can't do side jobs

Unions pay living wages and provide insane health care and retirement packages. So I supposed when people say side jobs, they imply those working non union jobs.